Pages

Monday, April 30, 2012

Puzzlement

The weekend went too fast! Especially since Russ had to go into work on Saturday... after the cake class it just seemed like Saturday was mostly over! I managed to make it to Michael's because I had a 40% off coupon that was going to expire and I thought for sure there would be something that I wanted to spend it on.

While moseying along the aisles not looking for anything in particular I stumbled upon some mini wooden blocks that were in the shapes of pyramids, spheres, half-spheres, and cubes and was immediately reminded of something I saw in TJ Maxx not too long ago that I had wanted to emulate.

The wheels began to turn and I gathered my supplies for this "puzzling" project. Now my shapes don't look exactly like puzzles like the inspiration piece above but, I think it turned out similar and just as interesting.

I found a cheap shadowbox/ collectible case and bought my wooden shapes.

The gold paint was very very watery and only seemed to give them a slight gold glitter. I was after more gold than that I I waited patiently for the paint to dry.

I used my gold leafing pen and rubbed it on a paper towel and quickly rubbed down the surface of the blocks. I wanted a gold twinge instead of the all-gold puzzles in the inspiration piece.

The paper towel method worked out pretty well and here's the before and after:

After gold leafing the rest of the pieces I was finally ready for gluing.

I was going to measure the distance and make sure the pieces were evenly spaced but decided ultimately to eye-ball it. What's fun about this is you can place the pieces in any order you like and whatever appeals to your eyes the most.

Then I adhered the black cardstock to the case backing (as you can see the backing got ripped from the paper that had been inside it, the glue ripped the paper... oh well, it's covered up).

Then I pieced it all together and hung it up!

I might paint the frame black later on down the road but I think it looks pretty cool for now....